Ruhle said the late Syrian leader Hafez Assad decided to cooperate with Iran and North Korea on the nuclear project with the goal of developing nuclear weapons.
North Korean ship traffic to Syria began the first deliveries of equipment in 2002 but aroused no suspicions from U.S. or Israeli intelligence. It wasn’t until the fall of 2006 that suspicions began to arise.
One reason for the intelligence failure was the fact that there was no electronic communications coming from the al Kabir construction site, Ruhle said.
Instead, the Syrians used couriers to communicate on the al Kibar project.
Ashgari’s revelations took western intelligence by surprise and they launched a top secret operation to find out about the plant, he stated. The operation included a 12-man commando unit in two helicopters to obtain soil samples and photographs of the plant. The mission proved it was a North Korean design reactor.
That led to the Israeli F-15 bombing raid on Sept, 6, 2007 that took the Syrians by complete surprise.
The North Korean role in the reactor was kept secret for months to avoid upsetting the six-nation nuclear talks on North Korea, which had become a centerpiece of the Bush administration’s Asian diplomacy. The talks ultimately failed.
